Four of my five kids have been on IEPs (Individual Education Plans) at one point or another. Two of them still are and I have little doubt that my youngest will be too once she hits school. She's only two, but she's already dropping her s's just like her brothers did. I don't have a problem with this. To be honest, everyone should probably have an IEP, but the term IEP carries a certain stigma with it, so in modern educational settings we call this "differentiated instruction". Whatever.

What I do have a problem with is the IEP process itself. Once a year, we all walk into a room (usually the principal, a guidance counselor, specialists, teachers, my wife and me, and possibly the kid in question, depending on his age (or her age, as the case may be in a few years). Everyone goes around in a circle, gives an update (he's having trouble with this, he's doing well with this, he needs to work on this, etc.) and then the special ed liaison turns to us and says, "So what is your vision for ? Do you have any goals in mind for ?"

I've literally done this at least 30 times for my kids. I can come up with a brilliantly crafted vision statement faster than most people can sign their names. When I was teaching and sat in on other kids' IEP meetings, I used to help other parents write vision statements for their own kids. I couldn't help myself. And, not to pat myself on the back too hard, but mine were better than theirs anyway.

Then a couple weeks later, we get a big envelope in the mail with said vision statement featured prominently and a recycled set of goals from the previous year with minor updates. Or they're the same goals if the secretary forgot to change them. I skim the 20-page document to make sure they aren't slipping in some reduction in services we didn't authorize, tell my wife it's OK, she signs it, sends it back, and that's the last we hear of the IEP.

It's a legal document that obligates the school to provide services. Nothing more, nothing less. Whether or not my kid is achieving his goals or, better yet, having positive outcomes in school rarely has much to do with that document and much more to do with his teachers' efforts and my "active followup" (that's a euphemism for being a pain the butt). This is the same document, by the way, that teachers skim at the beginning of the year and then ignore for the rest of the year just like we do.

I know I'm making some very sweeping statements here and I know that there are very notable exceptions to the scenario above. I also know that there are schools and districts that are even worse, whether because of poor funding, poor training, or both. The point is that this process is generally broken nationwide and does nothing to address kids without disabilities but are either gifted or struggling in specific ways that should be addressed with specific differentiated instruction.

Goalbook, as its name suggests, focuses on those very goals and outcomes that otherwise sit in binders and file folders through a familiar social interface that makes managing and adhering to IEPs easy. The network is designed to give parents, teachers, and specialists at-a-glance visibility into a student's accommodations and goals. In an interface reminiscent of Facebook (without Zynga or any pictures of your nephew chugging from a beer bong) and Edmodo, users can post quick status updates, notes, and "Celebrations".

Digging deeper gives much more detailed information, but, more importantly, provides a very straightforward interface for updating and presenting progress on goals with specific, concrete, attainable objectives. Teachers can add to a bank of goals that can be reused with many students and can upload files relating to individual goals, allowing them to build portfolios for their students. Goalbook also includes a universal goal bank that is aligned to the new Common Core standards.

Among early beta users, the most exciting use case, though, is the application of Goalbook to all students, not just those with IEPs. And there's the rub. It shouldn't take a legal contract for students to be assessed based on goals, objectives, and outcomes or for parents and teachers to be able to communicate through an intuitive social interface about a student's progress outside of the occasional progress report or grade report. Of course, as we know, even an IEP rarely leads to much straightforward communication.

Not surprisingly, although the website itself is quite outstanding, both conceptually and from a UI perspective, Goalbook is pushing hard to bring tablet and mobile apps to the table that will make it even easier for teachers to keep the system updated and actively manage their students' goals and objectives in real time or to quickly consult accommodations.

Goalbook is the first educational application (website, tablet app, or otherwise) about which I've been truly excited in a long time. This is a very different approach to managing student data and represents a realization of what "social" should be and do in education. It's still in beta and development is ongoing, but if this is the beta, I can't wait to see what the production version and the tablet apps bring to the table.

Christopher Dawson grew up in Seattle, back in the days of pre-antitrust Microsoft, coffeeshops owned by something other than Starbucks, and really loud, inarticulate music. He escaped to the right coast in the early 90's and received a degree in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. While there, he began a career in health a...
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Christopher Dawson is the owner and principle consultant for tekedu.net, formerly 6geeks.net, formerly 2D Business Services. Obviously this little company has evolved over the years, first as a side job consulting for local biotechs and ultimately becoming an umbrella for consulting and writing work related to educational technology. He spent 2 years as Vice President of Business Development for WizIQ, Inc., heading up US operations for the Indian company; he still consults for them. He has worked for his local school district as a teacher and technology director, for the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, and for Biogen, Inc. (now Biogen-IDEC, Inc.). He has also consulted with STATNet and Cytyc Corporation and retains close ties with X2 Development Corporation (now part of Follett Software, the supplier of the student information system he administered for several years), including occasional activities that involve some sort of honorarium. However, he promises that if he writes about anything interesting they do, it's because it's interesting and not because they tossed him a few hundred bucks a while back.
He regularly purchases and/or recommends Dell hardware. This is because Dell makes good hardware and has truly committed itself to education in innovative ways, particularly with their "Connected Classroom" initiative. It isn't because he has had dealings with the company through his role at WizIQ (which he has) or because they have provided him with long-term loans of a variety of equipment for in-depth testing (which they have). HP gets nods from him, too; they have similarly provided him with equipment on long-term loan and their workstations rock out loud, so they deserve the coverage.
He actually buys Apple equipment because they don't send him free stuff and he has a nasty Apple habit that he can't help feeding occasionally.
Intel (reference designer for the Classmate PCs he has implemented in his local schools) has provided him with long-term loans of Classmate PCs for testing, as as has Lenovo with its educational offerings. Intel paid all expenses for his attendance at the 2009 Intel Classmate PC Ecosystem Summit which he attended as the sole representative of the technology press. He was invited to attend in 2010 but his wife would have killed him if he spent 3 days in Vegas geeking out and left her home alone with a new baby.
And Google? Well, he has more than one Chromebook provided as preview units and runs his consulting business with Google Apps (in fact, he has 5 different domains tied to Google Apps, one of which he actually pays for to use Google Apps for Business).
Acer provided him with a 50% discount on an Aspire One netbook in early 2009 after he tested it for 30 days through their educational seed program. He liked the netbook at the time but it has since broken and sits unused in his office. Canonical sent him Ubuntu lanyards, t-shirts, and mousepads for his kids. He stole one of the lanyards and proudly hangs his keys from it and occasionally features his 8-year old wearing an oversized Ubuntu t-shirt on his Facebook profile.
Gunnar Optiks sent him a pair of computer glasses to evaluate for a holiday gift guide. He is wearing them now as he types this because they never asked for them back and they rock out loud, too. Seriously - they work brilliantly and make it much easier to spend 20 hours a day staring at an LCD. If they ever asked for them back, he would fork over the $99 and buy a pair.He even convinced his mom to buy him a pair of their sunglasses for his birthday.
Microsoft gave him 2 free copies of Office 2010 professional, a desktop clock, and a useless book on Office 2010 when he attended the launch of Office/Sharepoint 2010. He occasionally uses the SharePoint lanyard they gave him instead of the Ubuntu lanyard for his keys, but feels dirty afterwards.
Blackboard paid him to be a keynote speaker at their 2012 Developers Conference but then went and bought a bunch of open source companies, bumped him from the program so they could explain why they would do such a thing, and he got to keep the cash, all for covering the event for a day. It was bloody hot and humid in New Orleans, so he earned every cent.
Adobe has given him lots of software and more than a couple free lunches at various conferences. Like the Gunnars, he would actually buy a Creative Cloud subscription if his free licenses on CS6/Creative Cloud run out because he couldn't do his job without them and CS6 (yes, I'm going to say it again) rocks out loud. Seriously. $50/month for Creative Cloud is a third of what he'd be willing to pay for it. Which is saying something, because he's actually pretty cheap.
Any other companies wishing to send him cool things to evaluate, wear, or otherwise adorn his kids are more than welcome to; he promises to disclose it here if he keeps any of the stuff.
And speaking of free stuff, Tuf-Luv has sent him enough free stuff to cover just about every tablet, phone, and laptop he's ever owned. That said, when his dog destroyed one of the cases and the Motorola Xoom inside it survived without a slobber mark, he went out and actually bought a new one. Same goes for an iPad he gave away as part of a contest he ran with WizIQ - he (meaning his corporate Amex) actually bought a Tuff-Luv case because (you guessed it) they rock out loud.
He may report on any of these companies as his experiences with them have direct bearing on educational technology, Google, cloud services, etc; positive reports are not necessarily an endorsement and he receives no direct financial compensation from these companies or any others.
He's pretty sure that's it. If he thinks of anything else, he'll be sure to tell you all about it here. By the way, he also writes for lots of other publications, but pretty much just about SMB stuff, so it doesn't really much matter. The writing and broadcasting he does for Edukwest (not surprisingly, ed tech-related) usually gets cross-posted to ZDNet, so that's all good too.